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Award Ceremony Speech

Iceland is the cradle of narrative art here
in the North. This is ultimately due to the peculiar nature and
development of the Icelandic community. In Iceland there were no
conditions for the rise of the class society elsewhere so
characteristic of the Middle Ages, with its sharp contrast
between Church and people, between the learned and the peasants.
There books were not, as in other lands, the privilege of a few
priests versed in Latin. Even in the Middle Ages literacy was far
more widespread among the common people in Iceland than in other
parts of Europe. This fact created the basic conditions for the
writing down in the native tongue of the old vernacular poetry
which, in the rest of northern Europe, our country included, was
despised and forgotten.

So it came about that the poor little nation on its remote island
created world literature, producing prose tales which the other
European countries were unable to match for hundreds of years.
Snorre and the sagas will always stand out as peaks in the
art of historical narrative, as models of style in their
perspicuity, clarity, and vigour. The Icelandic saga, very
largely anonymous, is the product of a whole nation's literary
talent and independent creative power.

In Iceland the saga has always been held in great honour. To the
Icelanders themselves it has given consolation and strength
during dark centuries of poverty and hardship. To this very day
Iceland stands out as the literary nation of the North par
excellence, in relation to its population and its
resources.

Enormous power is necessary to renew in our time a narrative art
which has such traditions. In the book which Halldór Laxness
has written about the peasant poet Olafur
Ljósvíkíngur, he especially touches on the
problems and the mission of poetry, making one of the characters
say: "That poem is good which reaches the heart of the people.
There is no other criterion". But in order to reach the people's
heart, literary skill alone, however great, is not enough; the
ability to depict events and exploits is not enough. If
literature is to be a "light of the world", it must strive to
give a true picture of human life and conditions. That goal runs
like a continuous thread through most of what Halldór
Laxness has written. And as he has an extraordinarily fine sense
of the concrete things of human life and, at the same time, an
inexhaustible gift of storytelling, he has come to rank as his
people's greatest writer of the present age.

One of the most remarkable testimonies of the conflicts in modern
cultural life - not only in Iceland but in the whole of the West
- is Laxness's early work, Vefarinn mikli frá Kasmir
(The Great Weaver from Kashmir), 1927. Despite a certain youthful
immaturity, it carries weight as a contemporary document and as a
personal confession. The main character is a young Icelander, a
writer with an artistic temperament, who, during a roving life in
Europe, experiences to the full the chaotic perplexity following
the First World War. Like Hans Alienus at one time, he tries to
get his bearings and to find a firm footing in life - but what a
difference in situation! Far more than a generation in time
separates them. On the one hand, peace, unshakable faith in
progress, dreams of beauty; on the other, a shattered, bleeding
world, moral laxity, anguish, and impotence. Steinn Ellioi
finally throws himself into the arms of the Catholic Church.
Since Strindberg, few books in the literature of
northern Europe have bared inner conflicts with such
uncompromising candour and shown how the indi vidual comes to
terms with the forces of the age.

Halldór Laxness did not attain artistic balance until,
toward the end of the twenties, he returned to Iceland and found
his calling as bard of the Icelandic people. All his important
books have Icelandic themes.

He is an excellent painter of Icelandic scenery and settings. Yet
this is not what he has conceived as his chief mission.
"Compassion is the source of the highest poetry. Compassion with
Ásta Sóllilja on earth", he says in one of his best
books. Art must be supported by sympathy and love for humanity;
otherwise it is worth very little. And a social passion underlies
everything Halldór Laxness has written. His personal
championship of contemporary social and political questions is
always very strong, sometimes so strong that it threatens to
hamper the artistic side of his work. His safeguard then is the
astringent humour which enables him to see even people he
dislikes in a redeeming light, and which also permits him to gaze
far down into the labyrinths of the human soul.

Individual people and their destinies always move us most deeply
in Halldór Laxness's novels. Against the dark background of
poverty, strikes, and strife in the little Icelandic fishing
village, the shining, girlish figure of Salka Valka stands out,
resolute, capable, and pure of heart.

Even more affecting, perhaps, is the story of Bjartur, the man
with the indomitable will for freedom and independence, Geijer's
yeoman farmer in an Icelandic setting and, with monumental, epic
proportions, the settler, the landnámsman of
Iceland's thousand-year-old history. Bjartur remains the same in
sickness and misfortune, in poverty and starvation, in raging
snowstorms and face to face with the frightening monsters of the
moors, and pathetic to the last in his helplessness and his
touching love for his foster daughter, Ásta
Sóllilja.

The story of the peasant poet Olafur Ljósvíkíngur,
Ljós heimsins (The Light of the World), 1937-40, is
possibly his greatest work. It is based on the contrast between a
miserable environment and the heaven-born dreams of one who is a
friend and servant of beauty.

In Islandsklukkan (The Bell of Iceland), 1943-46, Laxness
for the first time sets the scene in a bygone age. And he indeed
succeeds in giving the atmosphere of the period both of Iceland
and of Denmark. Stylistically, it is a masterpiece. But even here
it is chiefly individuals and their destinies that one remembers:
the wretched tatterdemalion Jón Hreggviosson; "the fair
maid" Snaefriour Eydalín; and above all, the learned
collector of manuscripts, Arnas Arnaeus, in whom Iceland lives
more robustly than in anyone else.

Halldór Laxness has guided literary development back to
common and traditional ground. That is his great achievement. He
has a vivid and personal style, easy and natural, and one gets a
strong impression of how well and how flexibly it serves his
ends.

One more thing must be emphasized if Laxness's position is to be
properly understood. There was a time when the Icelandic authors
chose another Scandinavian language for their art, not merely for
economic reasons, but because they despaired of the Icelandic
language as an instrument for artistic creation. Halldór
Laxness has, in the field of prose, renewed the Icelandic
language as an artistic means of expression for a modern content,
and by his example he has given the Icelandic writers courage to
use their native tongue. Broadly speaking, therein lies his
greatest significance, and this is what has given him a strong
and very respected position in his own land.